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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29607036">Dog Days</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guardy/pseuds/Guardy'>Guardy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Emergency! (TV 1972)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fluff, Insomnia, M/M, Pining</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 03:02:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,487</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29607036</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guardy/pseuds/Guardy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Johnny would've preferred not falling asleep on the job at all, but he figures that, as far as accidental naps go, being lulled to sleep by the hum of the squad's engine and his partner's comforting presence beside him, head resting on Roy's balled-up jacket, is really not as bad as it could've been. </p><p>-</p><p>Perspective flip of my first E! fanfic "Catnap", now with Extra Johnny POV; uses S3E8 Insomnia as a plot hook.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Roy DeSoto/Johnny Gage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dog Days</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28657107">Catnap</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guardy/pseuds/Guardy">Guardy</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wasn't quite done with the concept of Johnny falling asleep in the squad and figured I'd try my hand at writing from that guy's perspective; quite like the way this turned out, all in all.</p><p>As per usual, original post plus Extra Authentic 70's Typewriter Version over on my E! sideblog, <a href="https://johnnys-green-pen.tumblr.com/post/643711227297742848/e-fan-fic-dog-days">HERE</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Johnny was furious at himself. For days he hadn’t been able to sleep, and now that they were having a fairly busy day, he couldn’t seem to stay awake. He’d almost fallen asleep on the way to their last call - it had been such a long drive into the canyons, and the Californian summer heat wasn’t exactly helping to keep him alert, either. </p><p>And then, the run hadn’t even amounted to anything. Just some kid nodding off in the park. He’d never thought he’d feel envy for some college kid falling asleep while pulling all-nighters, and yet…</p><p>He told Roy as much, too, who more or less just shrugged and told him that Johnny himself usually didn’t have any issues falling asleep either. Which was true, technically, but definitely not very helpful or particularly comforting. Not that he’d expected anything else, really - he was pretty sure his down-to-earth, “rational” and “reasonable” partner had never gotten himself into a jam like this before and had no idea how much it sucked to feel like crap and know perfectly well that he had nobody to blame but himself and his ridiculous overthinking.</p><p>And that? That was fine. He wouldn’t have wished things like that on Roy, for both their sakes, and empathy mostly seemed to be <em>his</em> deal, anyway, and he was okay with that. The real problem began when they were both back in the squad, and Johnny leaned back into the passenger seat and started to feel his eyes drift shut within minutes as he started to slump against the passenger door, just to startle awake again every time. Thankfully Roy didn’t seem to notice, too busy keeping the squad on the narrow dirt road to pay attention to his strange partner nearly passing out on the job because he couldn’t deal with getting to sleep through the night. He supposed there was a certain irony to it, even though Johnny couldn’t really appreciate it. At least not right now. <em>Definitely </em>not right now.</p><p>This wasn’t the first time he was in a situation like this, even though it really had been a while, and never for a reason quite <em>this</em> trivial. Inspections. Transfers. New captains. Exams. That time before he’d gone to Roy’s Q&amp;A session on the Paramedics Program. Meaningful, important or generally stressful stuff. Not just… something mildly out of the ordinary that everybody else would consider a good thing.</p><p>He was fully leaning against the passenger door now, his shoulder and head bumping against the glass, fully aware that this was the beginning of the end as far as staying awake was concerned, but he was just so awfully tired and even just leaning against something helped a little, made the bone-deep weariness just a bit less overwhelming. He still kept nodding off though, and of course his luck with Roy not noticing eventually ran out.</p><p>“Johnny, are you alright?” Roy suddenly asked, so startling in the silence that Johnny shot upright, equally startled and utterly mortified.</p><p>“Wha- what?” he stammered. “Me? Sure, I’m alright.”</p><p>Even he himself didn’t believe his own words, even he couldn’t help but notice how much of a struggle it was to make the words make sense and he hoped that they still sounded as coherent out loud as they had in his mind.</p><p>Probably not, though, given the obvious concern on Roy’s face. And sure, concern wasn’t anger, wasn’t the cold fury of somebody convinced he’d fallen asleep on them specifically to spite them or because he just didn’t care, but one could always turn into the other, and besides, even the concern was really bad enough, a mortifying acknowledgement that all of this was out of Johnny’s control, and he <em>hated </em>that. </p><p>“What do you think is for lunch today?” he asked, just to somehow get a conversation going as a last-ditch effort, hoping that, somehow, he’d manage to stay awake then, just for a little bit longer, just until they’d get back and he’d be free to sink into his not-that-soft pillow and inevitably be wide-awake again because some higher power clearly hated him, personally. </p><p>Roy seemed confused. “Johnny,” he said, “we already <em>had</em> lunch, remember?”</p><p>“I <em>know</em> that,” Johnny replied indignantly - and it wasn’t a lie, the issue was just that he couldn't remember what the hell he’d asked - just the first thing that had come to his mind, in the hopes that it’d make sense, but apparently that had been a deeply futile hope. “I obviously meant the… the other thing, the late one,” he added, and had already forgotten what the hell he was even supposed to be talking about by the time he’d finished the sentence. </p><p>By the time Roy asked “dinner?” Johnny was barely still aware he’d ever said something.</p><p>“Dinner?” he asked. “What about it?”</p><p>In the resulting silence, he realized that he’d clearly fucked up somehow, and he knew he should’ve just kept quiet right from the start. The look on Roy’s face was fiercely worried, and at this point, Johnny would have vastly preferred anger - he could have apologized, groveled at his feet if necessary, but <em>this</em>? This incredibly obvious concern? He had no idea how to deal with that, and it freaked him out big time. </p><p>It freaked him out <em>almost </em>as much as Roy pulling over on the side of the dirt road did, and for a moment Johnny’s heart skipped a beat - had he misread the situation? Would Roy dump him on the side of the road on the grounds that <em>walking</em> back was sure to keep him awake? He’d manage, of course, hitchhike the rest of the way back, he’d be fine-</p><p>Just a second later, Johnny remembered who he was with and instantly felt guilty for even <em>thinking </em>something like that, because despite everything Roy was Roy and Johnny knew he’d be safe with him, always, no matter what.</p><p>And so, when Roy said “Johnny, look at me,” he did, without hesitation, except apparently not <em>enough</em>, and so Roy reached over and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder and gently pulled him in the right direction, before sliding his hand up a little and then his fingers were suddenly curling around the back of Johnny’s neck and he was nudging Johnny’s face in the right direction with a thumb against his jaw and it took Johnny an embarrassing amount of restraint to not melt into the touch. It was so warm and comforting, and he tried very hard not to think about falling asleep in Roy’s arms and musing that he probably <em>could</em> fall asleep like that in a heartbeat, and he also tried very hard to ignore that quiet voice in the recesses of his sleep-deprived, muddy mind quietly whispering “kiss! kiss! kiss!”.</p><p>And then suddenly there was a bright light shining straight into Johnny’s eyes and he flinched and tried to pull away, just to be held in place by that gentle, calloused hand against his face. </p><p>“What the hell, Roy,” he muttered, but Roy just shushed him, so very gently, and Johnny hoped to hell and back that he wasn’t blushing. </p><p>“Can you smile for me?” Roy asked, still in that incredibly tender, intimate tone, and Johnny would’ve done everything for him right then, and so he smiled long before it struck him how odd that request really was. </p><p>Roy didn’t even acknowledge his confused “wait, why?”, instead just saying “right, hold your arms out in front of you like this,” and held out his own hands to demonstrate, arms parallel to each other and the floor like some very stiff zombie, and all Johnny could think about was that it was really a damn shame that Roy’s hand wasn’t flush against his skin anymore and he <em>really</em> had to stop <em>doing</em> that to himself. He followed Roy’s lead, to distract himself from his painfully futile crush if anything, and then finally realized just what Roy was doing.</p><p>“Roy,” Johnny said, incredulous, lowering his arms, “I’m not having a <em>stroke</em>, I’m just <em>really tired</em>.”</p><p>Roy kind of half-shrugged and turned the squad back on.</p><p>“You could barely string three coherent words together,” he said. “You’d have done the same in my stead. Why don’t you just give in and take a nap until we’re back?”</p><p>“Roy,” Johnny replied, mildly scandalized, “we’re on a run, I can't just sleep while we’re on a run.”</p><p>Roy threw him a short glance. “That actually makes some kind of sense,” he said.</p><p>“Of course it does,” Johnny replied.</p><p>Roy sighed. “Look, maybe you should just take a sick day, go home and get some sleep. I don’t think you should be working if it’s that bad.”</p><p>Johnny froze and glared at Roy; he’d heard that one often enough before he’d learned to toughen up - “if you can’t do your job, why don’t you just go home?”, with ‘...and don’t bother coming back’ usually being heavily implied. Hearing that from Roy would’ve ruined him. But then Roy just looked him in the eyes, all sincere and serious-like, and the tension melted away and Johnny felt himself relax like he’d just come back from a particularly harrowing run with all the victims resting at Rampart, safe and sound. </p><p>Johnny also knew that Roy was right, that just going home would probably be the smart thing to do, but he knew just as well that he could never let himself do that, could never just go to bed knowing that he’d taken the rest of the day off because he couldn’t convince his own mind to just let him <em>sleep</em>. </p><p>“Nah,” he finally said, “I’m fine when I’m working, it’s just this--” he indicated the road with a handwave -- “that’s a bit hard to stay awake for.”</p><p>It was the honest truth, too - he could take a helluva lot of sleep deprivation before the adrenaline of being called out on a run stopped being effective, he knew that. The bits in between the runs, though, and the time on the road? Those quickly became nearly unbearable. He’d spent far too many shifts shivering despite the searing California sun, fighting the dark spots crawling across the edge of his vision like fuzzy, legless spiders, forming every word so carefully to make sure he was being coherent just to still end up talking in gibberish that made sense to nobody but himself - more so than usually, anyway - and he sure as heck wasn’t eager to do that to himself voluntarily, but he also sure as heck wasn’t eager to put in overtime to make up for it yet again, and he also just couldn’t bring himself to cut his losses and go home without feeling deeply ashamed of himself.</p><p>“Are you sure?” Roy asked, “Because earlier…” and Johnny knew he was right, but wasn’t in the mood to talk about it.</p><p>“Roy,” he said, wearily, “drop it. Just… drop it.”</p><p>“Fine,” Roy simply said, and Johnny was relieved that he’d given up so easily, but also a bit concerned because Roy <em>never</em> did, and Johnny just couldn’t figure out what he was playing at. </p><p>He finally did figure it out a few minutes later, while he was desperately trying to strike up a conversation to keep himself awake, and Roy just flat-out refused to participate. The man would simply wait him out. The drive was long and Johnny was so incredibly tired and they both knew that there was no way he’d manage to stay awake for all of it. Sneaky bastard. At least he did look kinda guilty about it, for all the good that did.</p><p>Johnny fought like a tiger to stay awake, he really did, but he knew from the start that it was futile, and it didn’t take long before he started slumping against the door again, barely able to keep his eyes open. It was the downside to feeling so safe with Roy - falling asleep on him like that, especially after he’d declared that he absolutely wanted to stay awake, was still embarrassing as hell, but there was nothing to really, truly be afraid of, and the combination of a safe environment and the squad’s familiar, comforting hum lulled him to sleep with startling efficacy. </p><p>And then, there came a point when he simply didn’t have the strength or the resolve to lift his head away from the door again, and he just stayed there, fully aware that this was <em>it</em>. Somehow he didn’t care nearly as much as he should have. </p><p>He drifted between waking and sleeping for a while, just awake enough to see the irony in giving up on staying awake and then not even managing <em>that</em> properly, half-aware of his head bumping against the glass with every pothole. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was the best he could do, and so he stayed still, waiting for sleep to finally fully claim him.</p><p>The squad stopped a while later, and Johnny thought they were just waiting at a traffic light at first, but then he became vaguely aware of strong hands carefully lifting him away from the door, before gently placing him back again, his head now resting on something soft that smelled like his partner, and then he was out like a light for the rest of the way home, only waking up a few blocks away from the station. He blinked, still a little disoriented, before sitting up straight. Something slipped down the door and vanished from sight, and after a moment, he realized he’d been sleeping on Roy’s jacket, which did things to him that he probably should examine a bit more closely, but he didn’t really want to think about it, and besides, he’d long since admitted his futile little crush to himself, so he figured being ridiculously touched by such a simple little gesture was hardly a revelation - nor was, if he was being honest, the realization that his partner smelled like comfort and safety and perfect afternoons (and questionable aftershave choices, but then again, nobody was perfect).</p><p>“We’re almost home,” Roy said, and Johnny replied “I know” without even thinking about it, and then he fell silent and gave Roy an odd little look before he stayed quiet because he felt like he should add something, acknowledge Roy’s sweet, endearing kindness towards his foolish, tired partner, but he couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t either sound like teasing (which would’ve been fine, normally, but somehow he didn’t feel like it right then), or was entirely too sincere to the point where Johnny feared he’d reveal something best left unspoken.</p><p>And so, he just grinned at Roy, and said “not a single word to Cap, yeah?” and Roy smiled at him and replied “not one word,” and even though Johnny was still exhausted and terribly concerned about the night ahead of him, everything was right with the world for just one beautiful little moment.</p>
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